Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard

Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard
Михаил Моисеевич Бонгард

M. M. Bongard (1924 – 1971) was a
Russian computer scientist. He graduated in the early 1950’s from
the Department of Physics of the University of Moscow. Since 1958 he
started using computers to study the process of pattern
recognition considering it to be at the foundation of mental
processing. During 1959–61, Bongard and his colleagues created two
training programs for recognition and classification: “Arithmetic”,
and “Geometry”. His book, “The Problem of Recognition”,
published in the U.S.S.R. in 1967 (appeared as “Pattern Recognition”
in its 1970 English translation), introduced a
number of visual puzzles in its Appendix, which later became known as “Bongard
Problems” (BP’s). BP’s are primarily problems of visual
categorization, and thus played an important role in the
disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive science.

Bongard’s book contained 100 BP’s,
but later other people added more to the collection. A quite
extensive repository of BP’s, including all the original 100, can be found on
this page.

Bongard died in 1971 during a
hiking expedition in the Pamir Mountains.